There are a lot of things bubbling away in the storage pot at the moment and it appears to be almost ready to serve. Acquisitions are adding ingredients and we should see quite a few in early 2013 as well as firms snap up tech to flesh out the next generation of storage arrays.
Yes, we will see some more tick-tock refreshes; …

It's not just flash which will move closer to the server. Functionality will have to too. The only way you can guarantee security in the cloud is to encrypt data using a mechanism owned by the user, i.e. keys stored in the application or the server. Drive-based or applicance-based encryption don't work in the cloud as data is still transferred unencrypted.

This of course makes deduplication, thin-provisioning, copy services etc more difficult to host entirely within the appliance.